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Fedora 12 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks

11-05-2009, 05:10 AM

Phoronix: Fedora 12 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks

Canonical released Ubuntu 9.10 last week, which introduced the Ubuntu Software Center and brought a wide variety of other improvements, while Red Hat is scheduled to release Fedora 12 in two weeks. With the impending release and the current development freeze, we took the compose release candidate for Fedora 12 x86_64 and have looked at how its performance compares to Ubuntu 9.10. In this article are our results, which actually show some rather large differences between Fedora and Ubuntu when it comes to the speed of the Linux desktop.

Comment

People who are interested in performance are usually using hopped-up machines and they don't use the motherboard disk controller with a single drive. They are more likely to be using multiple drives with software RAID or a RAID controller, or a SSD.

I don't think it's possible to use these results to project what kind of performance one would get on a high-performance system.

If you are interested in single-disk performance with the motherboard controller, then it's probably because you are using a laptop, in which case the benchmarks would be much more indicative if they were done on a laptop.

Comment

People who are interested in performance are usually using hopped-up machines and they don't use the motherboard disk controller with a single drive. They are more likely to be using multiple drives with software RAID or a RAID controller, or a SSD.

I don't think it's possible to use these results to project what kind of performance one would get on a high-performance system.

If you are interested in single-disk performance with the motherboard controller, then it's probably because you are using a laptop, in which case the benchmarks would be much more indicative if they were done on a laptop.

This is true of any benchmarking, however in the case linux as they are both using the drivers in the linux kernel on the same hardware. Performance deltas can be accounted for by the tweaking of the kernel module for that hardware (a less likely scenario especially when both system use the same kernel revision) between kernel revisions or system configuration that a particular distro uses and it's selection of supporting libraries (a more likely scenario). Now unless there is a complete incompetence in supporting the hardware at the module level for a piece of utilized hardware one can extrapolate, more or less, which OS will give the user better performance.

Having said all of that, I still think that if PTS is going to be used to bench distro vs distro it should use the precompiled distro packages for it's tests as that is what a majority of linux users will be using instead of downloading and compiling the libraries which is a action that a user is unlikely to do when wanting to run that software. They will usually pull it off the distro's repo if available. After all you are benching a distro's packaging and config which is all a distro actually is. If this capability was put into PTS you could even bench pre-packaged vs built from scratch on the same distro to determine if it is even worth recompiling to see any gains. The way it stands now PTS is really only suited to compare 2 pieces of competing hardware on the same OS such as graphics cards, i/o setups, cpu's etc etc where recompiling of the libs may take advantage of extra device capabilities not included in the pre compiled binaries.